The Modern Customer Podcast

The Modern Customer Podcast is a show exploring the intersection of customer experience, social customer service and content. We will also dive into related leadership topics. The show is hosted by Forbes contributor and customer experience strategist Blake Morgan and features guests that include practitioners, authors, influencers and other tastemakers.

Joyce believes that technology in the future will make customer’s lives much better—and he doesn’t see technology replacing humans. Much like the people who at IBM run Watson, he believes technology will enhance the customer’s experience. Technology will eventually even prevent customers from having to contact customer care at all. Perhaps our products will talk to us and fix themselves for us.

He says human agents will still be in the mix but their role will be very different from what it is today. People who run customer experience will still manage the brand's customer care architecture, drawing upon trends highlighted by their virtual counterpart, to maintain the feedback loop and action the necessary changes to better serve customers and better reflect the values of the brand. It'll be their job to ensure their virtual counterpart behaves and evolves appropriately, so that every customer experience is seamless. In this podcast we talk about this and much more.

More about podcast guest Tim Joyce:

Tim Joyce is the Chief Innovation Officer for Xerox Customer Care.

Tim believes that the relationship between consumers and brands will change radically as artificial intelligence systems roll out. In this rapidly changing landscape, innovators will thrive and laggards will suffer.

Tim was educated in Oxford and Durham where he studied Computing and Mathematics. In the early days of the web, he was an ecommerce specialist, pioneering online shopping in the UK. At Xerox he has lead software development, solutions, product and research functions, and now heads innovation. He is a strong believer in -- and has published several papers on -- Agile and Lean, and brings these disciplines to every engagement. Tim is passionate about building innovative software products and solutions that deliver a fantastic user experience. He lives on the Jurassic Coast in Poole, U.K., with his wife Jenny and 3 girls. In his spare time, he enjoys sailing, cycling and playing chess.

Today customers want products and services when and where they want them. Not only is timing and delivery key, but customers want to design their own experiences. Customers want the comfort and ease of ordering things via the web, but they want the option to create something that is specific to their tastes.

That said, Shoes Of Prey, a website where you can order your own shoes, is becoming one of the hottest new trends. Partnered now with Nordstrom, Shoes Of Prey creates an in-store retail experience so customers can touch and feel the various fabrics and try on different looks, but the entire process is done via the web. It can be said the sharing economy has been so successful not just because of the diverse and authentic offerings, but also the ease with which you can order something on demand. Retail stores have complicated inventory processes. They can’t figure out a way to plan for variation in products or services. We’re used to on-demand software, we order books effortlessly on Amazon that are instantly downloaded to our device, but the idea of mass custom made products has yet to take off. People got very excited by the idea of 3d printers where you could print your own plastic figurine, chocolate or even custom limb—but this trend has slowed down. After all how many people have 3d printers in their homes? Not many.

Today Shoes Of Prey is limited to women’s shoes, however you can imagine how a company like Shoes of Prey would expand its on-demand services. Today the company that can bring the most tailored authentic products and experiences to the masses will win. These are the experiences today’s consumers seek. This week on the modern customer podcast we feature Jodi Fox Co-founder and Chief Evangelist at ShoesOfPrey.com - the world's first website where women can design their own shoes.

Started just 4 years ago, Shoes of Prey broke even at 2 months, hit multi-million dollar revenue in under 2 years and today is a global multi-million dollar enterprise. She’s also co-founder of SneakingDuck.com - an online optical fashion store focused on the Australian market.

Jodie's creativity and passion is directed into guiding both companies product and communications. She was Telstra's 2011 business woman of the year for private and corporate, one of the top 30 most influential women in Australian retail 2014, one of the top 10 Australian female entrepreneurs for 2014 and a finalist for the 2014 InStyle Audi Woman of Style awards.

She is a banking and finance lawyer by trade who explored the world of advertising before starting her own businesses.

national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is a network of four art museums), Beatrice Burrows, Digital Marketing Officer for Tate, and Robin Zucker, the SVP of Digital for Playboy.

The panel focused on four areas that include:

Omni Channel Advertising

Challenges in Creating Content for Different Demographics

Social Media Challenges

How the Rise of Digital Mobile Marketing Effect Consumer Behavior

What happens when you bring together a publisher, a museum institution and a consultant? A lot of talk about engaging customer experiences, content strategy and stand-out social media examples. At the Los Angeles based Digital Marketing Innovation Summit in September Playboy, Tate and I met to do a panel on "Engaging Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives."

The panelists were: Maria Pavlou the Digital Communications Officer for Tate (the Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is a network of four art museums), Beatrice Burrows, Digital Marketing Officer for Tate, and Robin Zucker, the SVP of Digital for Playboy.

The panel focused on four areas that include:

Omni Channel Advertising

Challenges in Creating Content for Different Demographics

Social Media Challenges

How the Rise of Digital Mobile Marketing Effect Consumer Behavior

We talked at length about how important experiences are when marketing to millennials. For example did you know that 3 in four millennials would prefer to purchase an experience over buying a product? In the panel we also address the difficulty of social media marketing and how to do it well. We provide fun examples of really good content strategies in addition to drawing from our own companies. For example we discuss this GoPro video campaign- a fantastic example of how to inspire and engage.

Tate is doing some very cutting edge work to engage their audiences. Did you know they encourage people to take selfies with the art? They are doing fantastic work with Instagram,Twitter and Facebook--and soon Snapchat.

Playboy Magazine is an established brand with a growing digital footprint. Did you know Playboy Magazine is an esteemed literary publication having been the seed for many things such as the film Hurt Locker? The film was inspired an article about one of the bomb experts, Sergeant Jeffrey S. Sarver entitled, "The Man in the Bomb Suit", published in September 2005. Playboy has also published Margaret Atwood one of my all-time favorite literary geniuses. Playboy is a lifestyle brand and publisher that recently made news announcing it will no longer feature nudes in its publication.

I personally thoroughly enjoyed moderating this panel and I hope you enjoy listening. Please see the player for the modern customer podcast below.

While every department needs a strong leader within the company, it can be said that customer experience needs an exceptionally strong leader. The reason being it’s not always intuitive for companies to invest in strong customer experience programs. Much of the budget goes to marketing or product or sales. That said, on the modern customer podcast this week we feature customer experience leader Leyla Seka.

Seka is a leader in the customer experience industry serving as SVP and General Manager of Desk.com, Salesforce's all-in-one customer service app for fast-growing companies such as Yelp, SnapChat, Munchery, Bonobos, Dot & Bo and Luxe Valet. Desk.com connects agents with email, phone calls and social channels. Salesforce had an immense impact on the way companies interact with customers, specifically how companies store and manage that customer data. Gone are the days where everyone in the company doesn’t have the opportunity to touch that customer interaction, and collaborate around it. Desk.com plays a key role in the customer service side of customer experience.

More about Leyla Seka

Prior to her role as General Manager and Senior Vice President, Salesforce Desk.com Seka was responsible for building and growing the Salesforce AppExchange, the world’s leading business apps marketplace. In her eight years at Salesforce, Seka has held a variety of positions across product management, product marketing and business operations helping to build a scalable infrastructure to support the company’s business. Prior to Salesforce, Seka worked in product management and marketing organizations at Primavera Systems (acquired by Oracle), Evolve Software, Vivant and Eutron SPA. Seka also spent two years in West Africa as a Peace Corps officer in Mali. Seka holds a BA in International Relations and French from the University of California at Davis and a MBA from the Masagung School of Management at the University of San Francisco.

Since 1987 the share on consumer spending on live experiences and events relative to total U.S. consumer spending has increased 70%. Additionally 3 in 4 millennials would rather buy an experience than a product. All of that is good news for StubHub an online marketplace owned by eBay, which provides services for buyers and sellers of tickets for sports, concerts, theater and other live entertainment events. The events industry is a social industry, meaning customers that attend events are often tweeting or Facebooking. Randy Rubingh runs customer service for StubHub and built the social customer service strategy.

The reality about social media is many companies fall into it the same way. A tweet was sent to the CEO or a PR flare-up happened. For StubHub there were misconceptions about what StubHub was. They were accused of being "scalpers" which StubHub is not. In order to clear these misconceptions StubHub started engaging on social media. StubHub took the opportunity to explain what StubHub’s role was. Today they make it a priority to be there where their customers are.

He says at StubHub customer service has a strong partnership with marketing in order to run social media well. Marketing uses Facebook for promotions and--like many other companies--customer service responds to all mentions of StubHub on the web. Depending on the engagement, customer service will step in and store that interaction in their CRM (Siebel). When I interviewed Rubingh on the podcast he said that StubHub believes social media training is more about calibration than it is hardcore scripting. The calibration process includes a review of all the interactions. He says he took smart seasoned agents—and trained them on their tool that tracks and categorizes the mentions (Lithium). The agents then respond. Rubingh believes that on social media a customer service script is not helpful.

StubHub gets about 50K mentions of StubHub, but the number StubHub responds to is only about 5% of those social media interactions. They manually categorize the sentiment.

Rubingh (@rrubingh) is the Senior Director of Customer Service for StubHub and the author of “Call Center Rocket Science”. Randy has more than 25 years’ experience building, managing, and leading customer support organizations. He has led service organizations ranging from small start-ups with as few as five agents to leading a five-site, international customer service organization with thousands of agents. During the course of his career he has managed over 20 million incoming phone calls.

Learn more about staffing, contact centers, customer service and how to create a killer contact center culture at StubHub in this podcast.